26 ms·

Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform

564 points by mwheeler 9y ago

ArchReaper 9y ago
Why should anyone care? I don't see anything technically novel or interesting in this. Edit: I'm not disparaging this, I'm asking a question...
- jimnotgym 9y ago
  I am happy to see an alternative to Facebook comments. > Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance. > Talk is small — about 300kb — and lightweight Both are an improvement over FB IMHO
  - wyattjoh 9y ago
    Wyatt from the Coral Project here. It's all about the news rooms owning the data of the comments, not social networks like Facebook. We're using tech like GraphQL to make the experience possible on multiple platforms through our extensible and pluggable API.
    - walterbell 9y ago
      Does Mozilla have a copy of the data, e.g. does it work like Disqus?
      - wyattjoh 9y ago
        Not at all. The software Talk [1] it installed on newsroom's infrastructure. We only provide the software the makes this all work. [1]: http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html
        walterbell 9y ago
        Do you think the Facebook "social networking" GraphQL patent applies to Talk? https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/using-graphql-why-facebook-now-owns-you-3182751028c9 https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/using-graphql-why-facebook-n...
  - gog 9y ago
    I realize that this could be considered lightweight by today's web standards, but to me this is still huge.
    - r1ch 9y ago
      I hope that 300KB refers to the backend code size, since one of the selling points is organizations run their own version. There's no way you need 300 KB of frontend code to render HTML from a database.
      - jandrese 9y ago
        Import a JS Framework or two and you'll easily blow that 300kB.
    - jandrese 9y ago
      Woe be to the person still on dialup modem. 300kb on a 56k modem is around a full minute download if memory serves. Of course said modem user is probably already drowning in javascript frameworks anyway.
    - jimnotgym 9y ago
      My point is that compared with Facebook SDK this project is tiny
      - gog 9y ago
        I understand your point, I just hijacked your comment to voice my frustration about current trends. I tried checking the actual size of the JS being loaded, but since the site for an article I opened made over 500 requests to load the page after I turned off add blockers I gave up. In their case, 300kB _is_ tiny.
        KajMagnus 9y ago
        Here's one that is of size half-tiny then :- ) another open source embedded commenting system, with different features & look, & 150 kb JS: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments. I'm developing this. Still, even just 150 kb is actually a bit slow, on slow 3G connections.
  - the8472 9y ago
    The whois of the domain from which the JS is loaded shows that it is owned by wapo too. That's great, disqus always loads everything from a CDN.
  - KajMagnus 9y ago
    Here's another open-source & ad-free & track-free alternative, 150 kb lightweight, + some unique features & look. https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments (I'm developing it, ... submitted yesterday, no one noticed)
- ksenzee 9y ago
  The really hard problems in this area aren't technical. They're social. Any attempt to make comments sections useful again is a welcome step.
  - SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
    I disagree, at a very basic level. I think comments -- and really the nature of online interaction -- is ripe for disruption using new technical solutions that alleviate many of the older pain points. As an example, people propose social solutions to problems like trolls on Twitter, but that seems to stem more from a lack of imagination in technical solutions. Social solutions are things like banning trolls. A technical solution would be something like spam filtering to categorize content and then allow people to have filters built around those categorizations. Of course, the reason people don't advocate those technical solutions is actually simple: they don't provide power to a centralized authority to enforce their will on others. I'm leery of most of these "social solutions", because at heart, they all seem to be dubious people arguing why they should have control over the material other people can interact with. I don't think it's accidental that people are proposing dominance and control over freedom and technical solutions.
    - wyattjoh 9y ago
      The advantage of our technical solution Talk [1] is that we provide a flexible plugin layer. The benefit is that tools like the Perspective API [2] that provide machine learning tools to augment the experience. So really, we're providing a framework for newsrooms to attach more sophisticated tooling to solve the issue from both a technological perspective and a social one. [1]: http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html [2]: https://www.perspectiveapi.com https://www.perspectiveapi.com
- s73ver_ 9y ago
  You asked it in a pretty disparaging way, though. The way you phrased that, it seemed like you weren't asking in good faith, but were rather sarcastically saying it, with the underlying tone being "this is stupid."
tvanantwerp 9y ago
As a DC-area resident and frequent reader of the Washington Post, the biggest problem with their comments section is the commenters. I'm not sure how this helps.
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  > "I'm not sure how this helps." Better tools to filter out trolls leaves more space for healthy debate.
  - Twirrim 9y ago
    > Better tools to filter out trolls leaves more space for healthy debate. The very nature of US political discourse itself leaves no space for healthy debate. I'm sceptical that removing the trolls is going to be sufficient to fix that.
    - sbov 9y ago
      It would, but then there would be no one left to comment.
      - ZenoArrow 9y ago
        Except that by doing so it leaves a vacuum for more reasonable commenters to fill. It's not a culture change that happens overnight, but the potential long term benefits make it worthwhile.
    - JacobJans 9y ago
      > The very nature of US political discourse itself leaves no space for healthy debate. I am quite convinced that the nature of US political discourse is largely determined by the predominant media, and not by the individuals participating in the discourse. –– Cable news is incentivized to sensationalize any minor event, and to frame stories centered around conflict –– Social media rewards the most emotionally potent messages, consistently pushing aside calm discourse in favor of messages that hit emotional hot-buttons –– Newspapers, magazines, etc have adapted their style of writing in order to gain more traction on social media, furthering the cycle of increasingly strong emotional engagement. Sure, newspapers are also often quite dispassionate, but those stories rarely gain much attention in the political realm. –– Social media also increasingly creates identity bubbles, where like minded individuals can support one another's beliefs. This grouping of people has lead to identity being the primary consideration; facts are secondary.
creaghpatr 9y ago
Can't speak for WaPo but the New York Times comments sections are absolutely dominated by a handful of designated 'top commenters' who rush to post on any major story. Sometimes their comments are good, but then there's the guy who writes a poem every single time, or 'Socrates' who posts the same cookie-cutter 'blame-the-GOP-all-the-way-back-to-bush' comment with the most dramatic rhetoric possible, trolling for likes of course. Having said that, I'm pretty satisfied with the Times comment system, everyone does get a voice even though the top comments are absolutely fixed.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- dionidium 9y ago
  I read the paper version of the Times most week days. There are no comments (well, I guess there are a few letters to the editor). I don't miss them. I'm sure commentcowboy236523 from Atlanta has some important things to say, but I don't need to read them. If I want conversation, I'll come to a place like Hacker News or reddit, where conversation is the goal. I can find that when I want it. But I don't need it when I'm trying to relax and enjoy the paper. Comments simply don't add any value to the experience. We don't need better comments. We don't need them at all.
  - richforrester 9y ago
    That's funny. I tend to skip the article and go into the comments. Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about. As for the "what's wrong" part itself: generally speaking, you can really tell by how the comment is written whether it's legit or not. That way, you kinda get two sides of the coin, and you can decide for yourself what's going on.
    - aaron-lebo 9y ago
      I really just don't believe you can determine the truth content of an comment by how it is written, but maybe that's years of reading good sounding but factually inaccurate comments on HN and Reddit. There's an art to writing psuedo intellectual bullshit, and most people aren't capable of (or aren't as good as they believe they are) at judging complex issues outside of their domain. Would just as soon not give armchair phd a platform. There's some research (don't feel like pulling it up - bullshit?) that talks about how the decline of valuing expertise has had some negative social consequences, but that's probably obvious.
Yhippa 9y ago
I would love to see a big site try to use Slashdot's old commenting system. Commenting felt like a privilege and so did moderation.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- CodeCube 9y ago
  Slashdot's commenting system was 100% an echo chamber ;)
  - justherefortart 9y ago
    Frist Post and I hate M$.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    Ultimately it's very difficult to separate "that's a bad opinion, downvote", from "troll, downvote". People won't even agree on which is which, especially the trolls. If you require someone to post really blatant stuff like "Hitler did nothing wrong" to be ejected from the discussion, then your discussion will be filled with ideological trolls who don't argue in good faith but insist that any moderation to their participation is censorship and echo chamber creation. Their theory that Global Warming is a big conspiracy demands attention, and they have plenty of links to "studies" to back it up.
    - alethiophile 9y ago
      The exact same set of moderation actions will look like a necessary and correct restriction on bad actors to one group, while looking like a choking echo-chamber imposition to another. The reality is that any social space needs to have a set of norms, including ideological norms, that are enforced to a degree to ensure they're followed. The idea of purely "open discussion" is a fantasy; if you ever have something that feels like that, it's because the participants have internalized the enforced norms sufficiently that they never run into the enforcement. The difficult problem is picking out a set of norms that successfully produce the quality of space you want. Sometimes that is an outright ideological echo chamber. (In fact, it almost always is, to at least the limited degree that there is some ideological position that would be rejected without consideration by the participants and met with hostility. This is a good thing.) Any talk of "open discussion" must always the include the important context of "within what boundaries".
jessriedel 9y ago
Are there any notable new techniques used here, whether social or technical?
- _rpd 9y ago
  The open source angle could be interesting in the long term.
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  I got the impression that there are some improvements with moderation tools and banning / blocking people, that is, things that aren't directly visible to the reader. Here's an alternative to Talk, with some new features / "techniques"?, directly visible to the reader: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments E.g. makes large discussions simpler to read / navigate, by using arrows, which one can click, to jump to the parent post (if it's far away), and then Back to jump back down and continue reading. (I'm developing this.)
thinbeige 9y ago
After reading this article over and over I am still clueless. What is this all about? Feature-wise it doesn't sound better than a comment system from HN, Reddit or StackExchange. Besides, Mozilla is really lacking communicational skills. This blog post feels like the documentation at MDN, tedious and unclear.
- carroccio 9y ago
  +1
- 4lch3m1st 9y ago
  Well, It's pretty much a commenting platform like Disqus, but with user privacy in mind, which seems a little strange to me, since it was conceived with (stopping) trolls and harrassment in mind. Point is, isn't identifying such individuals a way to explore their online data? I might be jumping to conclusions, but it is one of those topics that stink more whenever you mess with it.
  - AgentME 9y ago
    The privacy part is that companies get to run their own instance of it instead of trusting all of their commenter data to a 3rd party like Disqus.
    - 4lch3m1st 9y ago
      Unfortunately, it doesn't really remove the shadiness of the issue. Too bad.
      - AgentME 9y ago
        I'm not sure what the privacy issue is here. That moderators could connect a user's posts together? That's true of all popular platforms (where the user isn't using Tor anyway).
  - fortythirteen 9y ago
    Right below the fold of the Talk site [0] > We’ve created a streamlined system that can improve how people behave and interact in the comments space, and allow moderators to more easily identify and remove disruptive comments. Seems like one of its primary functions is a censorship tool. "Disruptive" is a very subjective term. [0] https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html
tyteen4a03 9y ago
Any NRK-style pre-comment quizzes?
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  NRK???
  - tyteen4a03 9y ago
    Yes, they've launched a beta tool that forces people to take a quiz before they're allowed to comment to ensure they actually read the article: https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers-test-their-article-comprehension/ https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers...
Animats 9y ago
Doesn't work if you have Ghostery turned on. The Washington Post has 15 trackers, and the comment thing has a cross-site scripting request. This thing writes many messages to the browser console. The last line apparently prevents even displaying comments. STARTING Paywall c4d7fa1f35.js:41:468 PAYWALL CHECK STATUS: c4d7fa1f35.js:42:331 "PWAPI URL: https://pwapi.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/09/12/state-department-official-quietly-visits-moscow-to-discuss-north-korea/?rplapisplit=1&referrer=https://www.washingtonpost.com/" c4d7fa1f35.js:42:405 PAYWALL ACTION: 0 c4d7fa1f35.js:43:138 PAYWALL URL: N/A c4d7fa1f35.js:43:218 PAYWALL SUB: Unsubscribed c4d7fa1f35.js:43:292 PAYWALL METERED: Metered c4d7fa1f35.js:43:393 PAYWALL METER COUNT: 4 c4d7fa1f35.js:43:498 PAYWALL MODE: 1 c4d7fa1f35.js:44:49 PB Debug: Fired comment_count_target.init:[object Object] c94e09db1d.js:381:443 boomerang.nt: [info] This user agent supports NavigationTiming. wprum.min.js:1:10101 pt.fetchStart: 1505251033854 wprum.min.js:1:10803 boomerang: [debug] Checking if we can send beacon wprum.min.js:1:10101 boomerang: [debug] Sending url: //rumds.wpdigital.net/metrics/?rum=%7B%22redt%22%3A0%2C%22nl%22%3A285%2C%22dns%22%3A0%2C%22tcp%22%3A0%2C%22rest%22%3A195%2C%22domt%22%3A904%2C%22uplt%22%3A3052%2C%22url%22%3A%22https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fnews%2Fjosh-rogin%2Fwp%2F2017%2F09%2F12%2Fstate-department-official-quietly-visits-moscow-to-discuss-north-korea%2F%3Futm_term%3D.b5cb34fc201d%22%2C%22site%22%3A%22www.washingtonpost.com%22%2C%22title%22%3A%22State%20Department%20official%20quietly%20visits%20Moscow%20to%20discuss%20North%20Korea%20-%20The%20Washington%20Post%22%2C%22domn%22%3A940%2C%22section%22%3A%22opinions%22%2C%22cntt%22%3A%22blog%22%7D v=0.9 u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fnews%2Fjosh-rogin%2Fwp%2F2017%2F09%2F12%2Fstate-department-official-quietly-visits-moscow-to-discuss-north-korea%2F%3Futm_term%3D.b5cb34fc201d if= wprum.min.js:1:10101 PB Debug: Fired sticky-vertical-sharebar.collides_with_main_content:false c94e09db1d.js:381:443 PB Debug: Fired nav.start_close:true c94e09db1d.js:381:443 PB Debug: Fired nav.finish_close:true c94e09db1d.js:381:443 Comments load: timer startedtwp-comments.js:1 [Echo.UserSession] error : Unable to initialize user session, error response from IdentityServer API received | args: Object { response: Object } 499c2b4a02.js:294:297
EasyTiger_ 9y ago
The top of HN for an article which says nothing much at all, really?
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  Interestingly enough, I submitted something similar yesterday, about another open-source commenting system with different features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15242630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15242630 — it got zero upvotes, although i think it's a bit interesting to read, for those interested in online comments. And the Mozilla post got > 500. Interesting how HN works, ... and the accumulation principle.
yeukhon 9y ago
Let me distract you from the actual content of the article first (I am sorry), because I am a little frustrated (I usually don't, and always almost give credits to the awesome works done by Mozilla; disclaimer: used to be a Mozilla intern). This article is too shy from actually showcase the product. Half of the article is devoted to PR announcement (which IMO is really a waste of time for most readers, even for the non-technical ones). Just first paragraph into the article, I had already given up reading through, but instead put my effort in spotting keywords to understand the motivations behind this new system, instead of jargons. The second half is a brief overview of the new system, but only two lines are relevant to what I was looking for. It’s filled with features that improve interactions, including functions that show the best comments first, ignore specific users, find great commenters, give badges to staff members, filter out unreliable flaggers, and offer a range of audience reactions. Then the rest of the bullet points are the usual "privacy" and "open source" speech which of course are important nonetheless. So I still don't have my answers (also badges system is really an unnecessary feature for a commentary system, espeically at the scale of a news site like WaPo). I suggest next time the writer should: * tell readers the challenges/flaws in existing system concretely and perhaps showing examples * the finding from their research participants, the hypothesis ,and how they conducted their experiments * explain concretely how the proposed system will help address the prominent flaws and issues This perhaps should turn into a research paper, but even as a blog post it should have more substances. At best, this article feels like a company quarterly performance announcement, which I just scan for keywords and move on, then I forget about all of it. So, what is the point of reading this anyway? README would have been far more interesting. I am disappointed. ---- Anyway, I don't really read comments on news sites. I can't explain why exactly but I feel disconnected and buried (much like what @creagpatr said about fixed commentary). I'd rather go on FB and comment there, even though there is a fairly good chance no one can read mine. Perhaps the social part of FB feels more lively and often comments are funny as hell. Yes, I know that comments on FB are just as echo chamber as many other places do. There is a site allows people to take side and debate to death. I forgot the name though...
- redavni 9y ago
  They did give examples. The Miami Herald, which uses Facebook comments. PBS Frontline which uses Discus, and Omnivision or something...which I couldn't find any comments. lol > perhaps showing examples
hello_there 9y ago
Here's a slightly off-topic dream about online comments: In an ideal comment system I believe that articles, comments and moderation events should come from three different, decentralized streams (like Atom) that the end user can subscribe to individually and that are joined at the end users client. That would would provide transparency to the moderation process, ability to comment anywhere, and it would allow moderators to become effective spam-filters without giving them the power of censorship. Now, imagine if this system was built into the browser and it became the default commenting platform for all websites...
- ZenoArrow 9y ago
  I like where you're going with this, but here's a question for you... Who controls the streams that are available on a website? Is it the end user or the website owner?
  - unescape 9y ago
    The end user should always be in control.
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      You say that, but have you considered the downsides? Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments, and site now has comments all over it that they have no editorial control over whatsoever. People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?
      - unescape 9y ago
        The musician can display whatever they want on their website; they don't have to host content they don't like. In the "dream" commenting system, the comments are independent; you can apply your own filters and fetch comments from sources the site owner may not approve of.
gkya 9y ago
I believe it's better to have discussion happen elsewhere, as in HN, Reddit, Usenet, &c., or in blogs and columns. This is cheaper for the publisher, and often those communities generate better discussion as they are comprised of more interested individuals with more genuine participation.
- _rpd 9y ago
  It isn't better for the publisher though. The longer that they can keep eyeballs at a site that they control, the more advertising they can sell. Commenting also allows the publishers to collect more demographic and psychographic data, which allows the publisher to charge advertisers more per view/clickthrough.
  - gkya 9y ago
    I really hope we will devise a better way to monetise online publishing, because ideally as a reader you'd want to keep your eyeballs at a site for the shortest amount of time possible.
unescape 9y ago
Mozilla Talk could be useful if it let me apply my own moderation schema (filters, blocklists, etc). It looks like another totally centralized moderation tool: https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html The only explanation of their approach is that they did "an enormous amount of research". This sounds about as convincing as someone claiming "Oh, I took a class in that."
- wyattjoh 9y ago
  Believe it or not, you can! Check our the documentation https://coralproject.github.io/talk/ https://coralproject.github.io/talk/ where you can use plugins to hook any any part of the commenting process.
  - unescape 9y ago
    Are you saying I can run plugins as a site user (not administrator)? That doesn't seem to be the case. https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/running/plugins/ https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/running/plugins/
    - wyattjoh 9y ago
      As a site admin, not a user. If you see our server side plugin api [1] you can see ways to extend the graph schema, hook into existing mutations/queries completed by the system to apply any set of rules or moderation policies you want. It would be a neat implementation if as a user, you were given the ability to create your own filters, which would certainly be possible if implemented via a plugin! But don't expect to do that on WaPo anytime soon. [1]: https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/plugins/server/ https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/plugins/server/
      - unescape 9y ago
        Thanks for the explanation. I would be interested to help build a plugin that implements user-local moderation policies, if sites would actually install it. If that's not likely to happen, then a distributed commenting model seems more useful to me.
peterjlee 9y ago
I think to have good comments, you need to build a good community. I sometimes see the same article shared across HN, Reddit and Facebook. Some sites have better comments than others..
mobilefriendly 9y ago
Mozilla -- the organization that fired its CEO because it disagreed with a political donation he made in California -- lacks credibility when it talks about building an "open society".
- intopieces 9y ago
  "Brendan Eich was not fired. After his appointment, there was backlash from the Mozilla Community. He came under pressure to resign and he did. The Mozilla Board that appointed him knew about his donation; they did not "remove him because of his views." If that alone was the issue, they simply wouldn't have given him the job in the first place. Resignation (after only 11 days in the CEO role) became the only viable path forward when a sizable portion of the Mozilla Community refused to follow the person that the Board designated to lead the organization. That wide refusal and rejection fomented the issue, and Eich's decision to maintain his public stance on gay marriage -- as is his right -- created an impasse. It is incorrect to say that he was fired or removed; it is fair, though, to say that he was forced out." https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ceo-brendan-eich-deserve-to-be-removed-from-his-position-due-to-his-support-for-proposition-8/#5f72f8602158 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ce...
  - xienze 9y ago
    > Brendan Eich was not fired. ... He came under pressure to resign and he did. So in other words, he was told if he didn't resign he'd be fired. Let's not play games, he wasn't going to survive that episode. > The Mozilla Board that appointed him knew about his donation I seriously doubt that, unless checking a person's political donations is a standard course of action Mozilla takes -- which would open a major can of worms (you didn't promote me because I donated to Trump). The whole episode reeked of someone digging around and raising a stink shortly after he made a highly visible move -- otherwise, why did no one in the "community" take issue with his donation in the several years prior?
    - FrankBooth 9y ago
      > So in other words, he was told if he didn't resign he'd be fired. External pressure, not internal. > I seriously doubt that, unless checking a person's political donations is a standard course of action Mozilla takes No need to do an investigation, it had been raised by people who were upset by the action years earlier. > otherwise, why did no one in the "community" take issue with his donation in the several years prior? They did, years earlier. You could've found this out yourself, but instead you decided to make trouble here instead. It's best to stick to topics you understand.
mythrwy 9y ago
You don't need to go to the comments sections of Washington Post to find trolling. There is plenty in the articles, particularly the opinion section. Of course they are mostly trolling Donald Trump lately so some people don't mind.
schemathings 9y ago
I think it would be interesting to see a filter that generates something along the lines of Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", the most distinctive phrases in the text of books, but for articles, and then tracks how closely the comments line up for that particular article .. might be a good indicator for authority ?
Nelkins 9y ago
If anyone was looking for it, the source is here: https://github.com/coralproject/talk https://github.com/coralproject/talk
jedberg 9y ago
Reddit has had embeddable comment threads for over two years. It was a feature I actually worked on nine years ago, but the standards weren't there at the time to make it work with voting. I know I'm super biased, but I still find Reddit comments the easiest to read and follow (HN is a pretty close second, especially after they added comment collapsing). Is it really just bad marketing it on Reddit's part that keeps others from using their embeddable comments? As a site owner, you can fully moderate the conversation by only embedding comments from a subreddit you fully control. You may not get quite as much data as Mozilla's solution, but in exchange you get the benefit of Reddit's 12 years of spam data that train its filters. I just don't understand why more sites don't embed the reddit comments.
- monk_e_boy 9y ago
  The best comment threads are on Slashdot, the ability to filter comments less than +2 makes it much easier to skim read all the good comments. On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting) Categorising (a la slashdot) comments is interesting, you can filter out 'funny' and keep 'informative' etc. But I guess it puts a burden on the users to select the right 'up vote' .... do you have a funny button, an informative button, etc? Facebook has solved this with their 'reaction' icons (like, funny, shock, heart) so user apatite is there for this kind of classification.
  - jedberg 9y ago
    > On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting) You can just collapse it. I agree with you that the categorization on Slashdot was nice, as was the metamoderating. But when I find myself on Slashdot these days, I find it impossible to follow a conversation with so many collapsed comments.
    - monk_e_boy 9y ago
      > You can just collapse it. Yeah, but I've usually swiped down and I don't know if its worth going back up to collapse it. Default sorting by category would be nice, push the funnies down and pull the interesting ones up.
elihu 9y ago
How do users authenticate? Do they need to register for an account and give their email address to every website they want to comment on? This seems like it would have been a good use-case for Persona, but that project was cancelled; is there any good replacement these days, besides the ubiquitous "sign in with your facebook account"?
StevePerkins 9y ago
I started by reading the comments section here on HN. Couldn't find any solid information about what this Mozilla thing actually is. So I broke down, and clicked the link to actually read the source article. Still couldn't find any meaningful information about the thing. At this point I considered this a personal challenge. So I clicked the link at the bottom of the article, to ITS original source (http://coralproject.net/ http://coralproject.net/). Still couldn't find any solid non-marketingspeak information about the thing. The Internet in 2017, folks. It's just turtles (comments) all the way down...
- dredmorbius 9y ago
  TFA actually does break down the deets on the technology reasonably clearly. I find your comment mischaracterises it significantly.
- abiox 9y ago
  can't tell if this is serious or not.
  - KajMagnus 9y ago
    Some people here at HN might be young people who are just getting interested in tech and internet stuff. The one you replied to might be a super bright young person, who just doesn't recognize all company names, just yet. ... Hmm, but when s/he says "this is year 2017" then it seems to me as if s/he has been around for a while, and likely would haven seen "Mozilla" before. :- ) B.t.w., Steve (the grandparent poster): Mozilla makes a super famous browser named Firefox. That's maybe the main reason "everyone" knows who they are.
snakeanus 9y ago
It would be nice if they would drop the account system and just let the users post their comments signed by their private key if they want to associate a comment with themselves or their persona. It would also be nice if they supported NNTP for commenting and reading comments. Moreover I think that it would be great if it worked without any js (or if at least worked with addons like librejs) - knowing mozilla however they will probably not care about these.
hartator 9y ago
Shouldn't they be focusing on the browser? There is literally a good hundred of solid solutions out there for web commenting - hosted, embedded or app libraries -, and Talk doesn't seem innovative at all.
- pcr0 9y ago
  Could you give some examples? Particularly ones that are open-source and framework-agnostic.
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  Here's one that innovates a bit, when it comes to browser side features, e.g. making large discussions simpler to navigate: (I'm developing it) https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments (example feature: click the arrows to jump to the parent post and refresh your mind, then click "Back" to jump back down & continue reading. But haven't ported the Back button to iframes yet.) (submitted yesterday, got zero attention :-/ ) Maybe for the staff at the newspaper, moderation features are more cool innovations, because that's what they will be using the most?
tasty_freeze 9y ago
I've always been frustrated by the Washington Post comment system. Many articles have hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand comments. When I revisit an article, I can sort by newest/oldest/highest replies or something like that. I can go to my user profile, select "my comments" and view my recent comments (though not in the context of the article they came from). For the comments I left where someone replied to me, I have no way to reply to them, other than to return to the article and hit "show more comments" 100 times and locate my comment and the reply so I can reply in turn. I hope the new system fixes that. It is otherwise about impossible to hold a conversation, so it reduces the incentive to leave a comment in the first place.
heroprotagonist 9y ago
I love Mozilla's efforts and I think this is an important area to improve. But, as petty and selfish as it sounds, I wish it were built in my development language of choice. Then I could modify and use it myself, or contribute, without that irrational dirty feeling. I know, node is very popular, and no disrespect to you if you use it. It's a personal failing. I just can't put my personal time into it any more. When I see a great project I get excited, and search out the source to see what it's written in. Then I often feel disappointed. Maybe I need to gain some flexibility.
remir 9y ago
Why not use machine learning and a sort of "reputation system" to filter out the noise and trolls? The system could analyse comments, but the users could also, instead of upvote/downvote buttons, have buttons with reactions such as "Interesting", "Insightful", "Not relevant", etc... Some people have informed opinion/interesting things to say and some people just contribute noise to the discussion. The system can learn both from the language and reactions from people. Just like in "real life", if someone is always talking out their ass, you learn to listen to them less and less because they don't have anything meaningful to say. It's just noise. The comment system should do the same. It learns from multiple comments and their reactions to determine a reputation. Obviously, if your comments are always seen as "not-relevant" and "toxic", then your contribution is worth less than other "insightful" and "interesting" contributions, so past a certain threshold, you stop being able to comment.
- colejohnson66 9y ago
  Isn't that what Facebook does with their curated newsfeed? Doesn't that just make echo chambers?
  - remir 9y ago
    I'm not on Facebook so I don't know much about the newsfeed, but the goal is to eliminate trolling and toxicity, not debates.
    - interstitial 9y ago
      The goal is to make companies pay for sponsored post and keep users "engaged" through manipulation. Nothing else.
- colordrops 9y ago
  Seems dangerous if the rules are not adjusted right. It could end up amplifying certain narratives and extinguishing others, and causing a divide between sets of people as they move to communities where they don't get blocked. Furthermore an AI would be more opaque than a simple voting system, and could easily be manipulated for unethical purposes. Lastly, this sort of system would heavily bias towards the mainstream viewpoint, which is a good heuristic, but the mainstream isn't always right about everything. There is a place for minority voices. I would posit that the extreme political division we now see in the US is a result of more powerful systems for influencing online discourse.
jancsika 9y ago
Can a client make a request to fetch all the things from a specific comment thread? Example: I go to a mailing list for pick-your-favorite-old-grumpy free software project. I click through the ancient, craggy mailman web interface. Hey, there's a button that says, "download the full archive (x MB)." Now I have all the things. Real World Use Case: The Guardian once deleted some comments on a Greenwald op-ed because of insert-old-craggy-British-law-here. Archive access would have empowered users to periodically archive the comments so that they have control over content they want to read, while the publisher is still able to remove comments from flow and archive when forced to censor.
davidy123 9y ago
Comments just aren't a very good approach if the point isn't to just pass time. Annotations are much better. Systems like hypotheth.is are slowly becoming more pervasive.
freeflight 9y ago
Wouldn't the easiest approach to this whole "issue" be to give every user access to individualized blacklisting tools? Just put a "This comment makes me angry" button next to each one and people who feel offended can click it to hide said comment and check a box to hide any future comments from that commenter. There, problem solved with no need for fancy machine learning algorithms or other institutions to play big brother for the internet commenting culture. Voting based systems generally seem to do a pretty decent job most of the time, especially when the community can be segregated by topics/interests like on Reddit.
- dmckeon 9y ago
  Usenet news user apps had individual blacklisting (and whitelisting and scoring) "killfiles" in the 1980s. They made reading popular newsgroups more tolerable, but did not scale in the face of "endless September" (1993). If a site allows a near-infinite number of anon or sock-puppet accounts, individual or even distributed blacklisting amounts to trying to empty the ocean with teaspoons. If posts or comments were strongly associated with an individual identity, then a distributed scoring system could help produce a more useful set of content, but would be likely to make an echo chamber. But, the scoring system could be gamed by persistent vandals. Also, anonymous or persistent pseudonymous posters may contribute valuable content - how can one allow for that content but defend against abuse?
  - freeflight 9y ago
    There's always room for improvement, like making blacklists shareable, AdblockPlus does this with their filter lists, afaik Twitter has, or at least used to have, a feature like that. Even simple measures, like preventing multiple accounts being registered to the same email address, can already greatly cut down on the trolling potential of most garden variety trolls. Nothing about this "problem" is new except for the perceived scale due to Internet-access having become widely available and more people being exposed to Internet culture, but the problem itself is pretty much as old as human interaction in general: How to deal with people whose views seem to be utterly incompatible, even offensive, to mine? Germany has been down this road for quite a bit longer, the only result so far: Comment culture is dying out, in many places it doesn't even grow in the first place anymore because there's isn't even the chance for it, as more and more site operators decide not to implement comment options at all because it puts them in muddy waters, legally speaking. Censorship is never an option, even less so when it's outsourced to some unaccountable entity, even worse when it's some machine learning algorithm where nobody understands how it actually works but people rather like the outputs they got from their inputs, it's basically a censorship blackbox. Honestly, I don't see the need for any of this and it's quite scary how this kind of authoritarianism has become so popular in past years. We used to look at China as a negative example, something we would never want to emulate, this has changed and now increasingly politicians are openly voicing their opinion that a system like China's might actually be "good". Maybe it's just me having gotten a thick skin for this kind of stuff, after 20 years on the net, but I neither see the need for any of this nor the "good" this is supposed to do, all I see is lot's of potential for making the Internet a worse place for open discussion, especially across ideological lines. All I see is yet another move towards more echo-chambers and less diversity of opinions. Which is important regardless how shitty some of those opinions might be, they can always serve as a bad and educational example, censoring them out of sight like they don't even exist, does none of that.
tambourine_man 9y ago
Off topic, but this is the first time I see two slightly different sandwich menus on the same page
intended 9y ago
>New comments and reactions update instantaneously Killer feature - in that its going to kill the process. This is chat. Or close enough to chat that its going to be used as chat. Chat is terrible for comments. A flame war on chat escalates at the rate at which someone can hit enter. like the wake of a ship, the comment area will expand, and defeat moderation ability to clean it up. Flame wars are bad enough, flame wars on chat which persist like comments are a bad idea. Make it update in non-real time.
- memeCrasher 9y ago
  A conversation that a moderator can't clean up, does save you from biased and unfriendly moderators. Something I find a lot of people carelessly shrug off - moderation isn't always a good thing. The act of moderation is, at its essence, censorship. That's a lot of power to be misused by the wrong sort of people. (and who is the wrong sort...?)
algesten 9y ago
> Talk is small — about 300kb — and lightweight This makes me feel old. Is 300kb really considered small these days?
- explodingcamera 9y ago
  Not really, 300kb for a pwa seems sane but for just for a comment system? That seems incredible bloated.
  - pvdebbe 9y ago
    Not just 300 kB of downloadable code, it's 300 kB of executable code. That's huge
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  I'm developing an embedded comments system, it's 150 kb on page load. https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments Disqus seems to be 600kb (I summed the size of the "disqus" scripts on a blog that uses Disqus).
deafcalculus 9y ago
I remember a time when commenting seemed like a weird idea. Why would someone write on your site instead of on their own site? And then dynamically generated pages and eventually social networks took over. I wonder if the internet would be a better place if everyone had their own websites and RSS/Atom feeds rather than the centralized services we have today.
camus2 9y ago
Back in the days I thought that what made the Huffington Post popular, politics aside, was its gamified commenting system which I though was excellent. Since then of course, it degraded UX wise until it was replaced by Facebook comments(horrible UX) and something completely useless today. At the end of the day what makes the difference between a good community and a bad one is tight moderation without censorship and focus.
lewisl9029 9y ago
> You own your data. I was super excited when I came across that first sentence in bold (italics here) on one of the points under "Here’s what makes Talk different". Wow, I thought to myself, does this mark yet another step in the revolution of the re-decentralization of the internet? Is Talk a product sharing the same ideological foundations as awesome projects like Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/), Matrix (https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/), remoteStorage (https://remotestorage.io/ https://remotestorage.io/), Solid (https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/), and many others that I'm doing a grave injustice to by not mentioning here (please do remind/enlighten me in the comments if you're aware of others!), that strive to give back to users the ability to control their own data to whatever degree technically feasible: where it lives, who has access to which pieces of it, how they may access/manipulate it, under what circumstances, and for how long, etc, etc. The concept of apps built on user-provided and user-controlled data-sources, envisioned by projects like these, has always been immensely appealing to me. If users truly controlled their data, and only granted apps access to the data they need to function, instead of depending on each individual app to host user data in their own locked-off silos, then switching to a different app would be a simple matter of granting another app access to the same pieces of data! Lock-in would completely stop being an issue! Imagine that! We could have a healthy and highly competitive app ecosystem where users choose apps by their own merit instead of by the size of their moat built on nothing but network effects. Newcomers could unseat incumbents by simply providing a better product that users want to use! Like a true free-market meritocracy! And then I read on: > Unlike the most popular systems, every organization using Talk runs its own version of the software, and keeps its own data. Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance. This is great for journalistic integrity, good for privacy, and important for the internet. And I realized, No, they were not talking to me, a lowly user hoping against hope to one day live in a world where we can truly own and control access to data that rightfully belongs to us. Rather, they were talking to platform owners like Washington Post, loudly proclaiming that with Talk, that they get to own my comments, my profile, my data, and that somehow it is "good for privacy, and important for the internet". Sadly, this is just yet another data point in the unrelenting trend in silo-ization of user data, and stopping that trend is becoming more and more of a distant dream because both newcomers and incumbents today realize the massive competitive advantage lock-in and network effects afford them. Incumbents will never give up their moat and allow the possibility of interop without a fight, and newcomers all end up racing to build up their own walled-off data silos because they have ambitions to become an incumbent enjoying a moat of their own one day. Even products that are built on top of open protocols and allow non-trivial interop tend to eventually go down the path of embrace, extend, extinguish, once they reach any significant scale. Regardless, for this particular instance, my rational mind realizes that platform owners are the group that Mozilla must appease and market to, in order for Talk to stand any chance of success, and that Talk as a product is definitely the lesser of many evils in the same space, and that fundamental change usually manifests itself as a series of small, incremental improvements, much like in this case where an open-source, privacy-respecting product manages to defeat numerous much more deeply pocketed and deeply entrenched rivals to secure a foothold in a competitive market. But as a longtime Mozilla Fanboy, however irrational it may be, I can't help but feel a little bit betrayed when even they are forced to send messages like this in a painful compromise that confirms my lingering suspicion that we're still a long way off from winning the battle for a user-centric internet.
foxhop 9y ago
Comment systems are tricky, everyone has an opinion on how they should work and how they should be moderated. Its very similar to forums and community building. I was so opinionated about my comment system I decided to build my own called Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com https://www.remarkbox.com) Its embed-able like discus but I want it to feel more like hacker news or reddit (deeply nested threads). My system is still a work in progress but I'm actively dog fooding it on my own websites and so far its working well. One major take away I've learned from this thread is that people really like to use the collapse feature here on hacker news and reddit to narrow in on the conversations they care about. I actually never used this feature on either site (I didn't even know what that [-] was on hacker news until today)
binthere 9y ago
> It’s fast. Talk is small — about 300kb Hopefully that's not the client size
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  Here's one that's 150 kb Javascript on page load, instead of 300 kb: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments — and innovates a bit when it comes to features for the readers. (I'm developing it.) Disqus seems to be 600kb (I summed the size of the "disqus" scripts on a blog that uses Disqus).
manbearpigg 9y ago
It's an echo chamber propaganda tool. It lets the content creator choose which comments are seen.

564 points by mwheeler 9y ago

Why should anyone care? I don't see anything technically novel or interesting in this. Edit: I'm not disparaging this, I'm asking a question...

jimnotgym 9y ago
I am happy to see an alternative to Facebook comments. > Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance. > Talk is small — about 300kb — and lightweight Both are an improvement over FB IMHO
- wyattjoh 9y ago
  Wyatt from the Coral Project here. It's all about the news rooms owning the data of the comments, not social networks like Facebook. We're using tech like GraphQL to make the experience possible on multiple platforms through our extensible and pluggable API.
  - walterbell 9y ago
    Does Mozilla have a copy of the data, e.g. does it work like Disqus?
    - wyattjoh 9y ago
      Not at all. The software Talk [1] it installed on newsroom's infrastructure. We only provide the software the makes this all work. [1]: http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html
      - walterbell 9y ago
        Do you think the Facebook "social networking" GraphQL patent applies to Talk? https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/using-graphql-why-facebook-now-owns-you-3182751028c9 https://medium.com/@dwalsh.sdlr/using-graphql-why-facebook-n...
- gog 9y ago
  I realize that this could be considered lightweight by today's web standards, but to me this is still huge.
  - r1ch 9y ago
    I hope that 300KB refers to the backend code size, since one of the selling points is organizations run their own version. There's no way you need 300 KB of frontend code to render HTML from a database.
    - jandrese 9y ago
      Import a JS Framework or two and you'll easily blow that 300kB.
  - jandrese 9y ago
    Woe be to the person still on dialup modem. 300kb on a 56k modem is around a full minute download if memory serves. Of course said modem user is probably already drowning in javascript frameworks anyway.
  - jimnotgym 9y ago
    My point is that compared with Facebook SDK this project is tiny
    - gog 9y ago
      I understand your point, I just hijacked your comment to voice my frustration about current trends. I tried checking the actual size of the JS being loaded, but since the site for an article I opened made over 500 requests to load the page after I turned off add blockers I gave up. In their case, 300kB _is_ tiny.
      - KajMagnus 9y ago
        Here's one that is of size half-tiny then :- ) another open source embedded commenting system, with different features & look, & 150 kb JS: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments. I'm developing this. Still, even just 150 kb is actually a bit slow, on slow 3G connections.
- the8472 9y ago
  The whois of the domain from which the JS is loaded shows that it is owned by wapo too. That's great, disqus always loads everything from a CDN.
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  Here's another open-source & ad-free & track-free alternative, 150 kb lightweight, + some unique features & look. https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments (I'm developing it, ... submitted yesterday, no one noticed)
ksenzee 9y ago
The really hard problems in this area aren't technical. They're social. Any attempt to make comments sections useful again is a welcome step.
- SomeStupidPoint 9y ago
  I disagree, at a very basic level. I think comments -- and really the nature of online interaction -- is ripe for disruption using new technical solutions that alleviate many of the older pain points. As an example, people propose social solutions to problems like trolls on Twitter, but that seems to stem more from a lack of imagination in technical solutions. Social solutions are things like banning trolls. A technical solution would be something like spam filtering to categorize content and then allow people to have filters built around those categorizations. Of course, the reason people don't advocate those technical solutions is actually simple: they don't provide power to a centralized authority to enforce their will on others. I'm leery of most of these "social solutions", because at heart, they all seem to be dubious people arguing why they should have control over the material other people can interact with. I don't think it's accidental that people are proposing dominance and control over freedom and technical solutions.
  - wyattjoh 9y ago
    The advantage of our technical solution Talk [1] is that we provide a flexible plugin layer. The benefit is that tools like the Perspective API [2] that provide machine learning tools to augment the experience. So really, we're providing a framework for newsrooms to attach more sophisticated tooling to solve the issue from both a technological perspective and a social one. [1]: http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html http://coralproject.net/products/talk.html [2]: https://www.perspectiveapi.com https://www.perspectiveapi.com
s73ver_ 9y ago
You asked it in a pretty disparaging way, though. The way you phrased that, it seemed like you weren't asking in good faith, but were rather sarcastically saying it, with the underlying tone being "this is stupid."

tvanantwerp 9y ago

As a DC-area resident and frequent reader of the Washington Post, the biggest problem with their comments section is the commenters. I'm not sure how this helps.

ZenoArrow 9y ago
> "I'm not sure how this helps." Better tools to filter out trolls leaves more space for healthy debate.
- Twirrim 9y ago
  > Better tools to filter out trolls leaves more space for healthy debate. The very nature of US political discourse itself leaves no space for healthy debate. I'm sceptical that removing the trolls is going to be sufficient to fix that.
  - sbov 9y ago
    It would, but then there would be no one left to comment.
    - ZenoArrow 9y ago
      Except that by doing so it leaves a vacuum for more reasonable commenters to fill. It's not a culture change that happens overnight, but the potential long term benefits make it worthwhile.
  - JacobJans 9y ago
    > The very nature of US political discourse itself leaves no space for healthy debate. I am quite convinced that the nature of US political discourse is largely determined by the predominant media, and not by the individuals participating in the discourse. –– Cable news is incentivized to sensationalize any minor event, and to frame stories centered around conflict –– Social media rewards the most emotionally potent messages, consistently pushing aside calm discourse in favor of messages that hit emotional hot-buttons –– Newspapers, magazines, etc have adapted their style of writing in order to gain more traction on social media, furthering the cycle of increasingly strong emotional engagement. Sure, newspapers are also often quite dispassionate, but those stories rarely gain much attention in the political realm. –– Social media also increasingly creates identity bubbles, where like minded individuals can support one another's beliefs. This grouping of people has lead to identity being the primary consideration; facts are secondary.

creaghpatr 9y ago

Can't speak for WaPo but the New York Times comments sections are absolutely dominated by a handful of designated 'top commenters' who rush to post on any major story. Sometimes their comments are good, but then there's the guy who writes a poem every single time, or 'Socrates' who posts the same cookie-cutter 'blame-the-GOP-all-the-way-back-to-bush' comment with the most dramatic rhetoric possible, trolling for likes of course. Having said that, I'm pretty satisfied with the Times comment system, everyone does get a voice even though the top comments are absolutely fixed.

deleted 9y ago
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dionidium 9y ago
I read the paper version of the Times most week days. There are no comments (well, I guess there are a few letters to the editor). I don't miss them. I'm sure commentcowboy236523 from Atlanta has some important things to say, but I don't need to read them. If I want conversation, I'll come to a place like Hacker News or reddit, where conversation is the goal. I can find that when I want it. But I don't need it when I'm trying to relax and enjoy the paper. Comments simply don't add any value to the experience. We don't need better comments. We don't need them at all.
- richforrester 9y ago
  That's funny. I tend to skip the article and go into the comments. Comments tell me "what's wrong with the article", and in doing so, give you a good picture of what the article is about. As for the "what's wrong" part itself: generally speaking, you can really tell by how the comment is written whether it's legit or not. That way, you kinda get two sides of the coin, and you can decide for yourself what's going on.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    I really just don't believe you can determine the truth content of an comment by how it is written, but maybe that's years of reading good sounding but factually inaccurate comments on HN and Reddit. There's an art to writing psuedo intellectual bullshit, and most people aren't capable of (or aren't as good as they believe they are) at judging complex issues outside of their domain. Would just as soon not give armchair phd a platform. There's some research (don't feel like pulling it up - bullshit?) that talks about how the decline of valuing expertise has had some negative social consequences, but that's probably obvious.

Yhippa 9y ago

I would love to see a big site try to use Slashdot's old commenting system. Commenting felt like a privilege and so did moderation.

deleted 9y ago
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CodeCube 9y ago
Slashdot's commenting system was 100% an echo chamber ;)
- justherefortart 9y ago
  Frist Post and I hate M$.
- jandrese 9y ago
  Ultimately it's very difficult to separate "that's a bad opinion, downvote", from "troll, downvote". People won't even agree on which is which, especially the trolls. If you require someone to post really blatant stuff like "Hitler did nothing wrong" to be ejected from the discussion, then your discussion will be filled with ideological trolls who don't argue in good faith but insist that any moderation to their participation is censorship and echo chamber creation. Their theory that Global Warming is a big conspiracy demands attention, and they have plenty of links to "studies" to back it up.
  - alethiophile 9y ago
    The exact same set of moderation actions will look like a necessary and correct restriction on bad actors to one group, while looking like a choking echo-chamber imposition to another. The reality is that any social space needs to have a set of norms, including ideological norms, that are enforced to a degree to ensure they're followed. The idea of purely "open discussion" is a fantasy; if you ever have something that feels like that, it's because the participants have internalized the enforced norms sufficiently that they never run into the enforcement. The difficult problem is picking out a set of norms that successfully produce the quality of space you want. Sometimes that is an outright ideological echo chamber. (In fact, it almost always is, to at least the limited degree that there is some ideological position that would be rejected without consideration by the participants and met with hostility. This is a good thing.) Any talk of "open discussion" must always the include the important context of "within what boundaries".

jessriedel 9y ago

Are there any notable new techniques used here, whether social or technical?

_rpd 9y ago
The open source angle could be interesting in the long term.
KajMagnus 9y ago
I got the impression that there are some improvements with moderation tools and banning / blocking people, that is, things that aren't directly visible to the reader. Here's an alternative to Talk, with some new features / "techniques"?, directly visible to the reader: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments E.g. makes large discussions simpler to read / navigate, by using arrows, which one can click, to jump to the parent post (if it's far away), and then Back to jump back down and continue reading. (I'm developing this.)

thinbeige 9y ago

After reading this article over and over I am still clueless. What is this all about? Feature-wise it doesn't sound better than a comment system from HN, Reddit or StackExchange. Besides, Mozilla is really lacking communicational skills. This blog post feels like the documentation at MDN, tedious and unclear.

carroccio 9y ago
+1
4lch3m1st 9y ago
Well, It's pretty much a commenting platform like Disqus, but with user privacy in mind, which seems a little strange to me, since it was conceived with (stopping) trolls and harrassment in mind. Point is, isn't identifying such individuals a way to explore their online data? I might be jumping to conclusions, but it is one of those topics that stink more whenever you mess with it.
- AgentME 9y ago
  The privacy part is that companies get to run their own instance of it instead of trusting all of their commenter data to a 3rd party like Disqus.
  - 4lch3m1st 9y ago
    Unfortunately, it doesn't really remove the shadiness of the issue. Too bad.
    - AgentME 9y ago
      I'm not sure what the privacy issue is here. That moderators could connect a user's posts together? That's true of all popular platforms (where the user isn't using Tor anyway).
- fortythirteen 9y ago
  Right below the fold of the Talk site [0] > We’ve created a streamlined system that can improve how people behave and interact in the comments space, and allow moderators to more easily identify and remove disruptive comments. Seems like one of its primary functions is a censorship tool. "Disruptive" is a very subjective term. [0] https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html

tyteen4a03 9y ago

Any NRK-style pre-comment quizzes?

dredmorbius 9y ago
NRK???
- tyteen4a03 9y ago
  Yes, they've launched a beta tool that forces people to take a quiz before they're allowed to comment to ensure they actually read the article: https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers-test-their-article-comprehension/ https://nrkbeta.no/2017/08/10/with-a-quiz-to-comment-readers...

Animats 9y ago

Doesn't work if you have Ghostery turned on. The Washington Post has 15 trackers, and the comment thing has a cross-site scripting request. This thing writes many messages to the browser console. The last line apparently prevents even displaying comments. STARTING Paywall c4d7fa1f35.js:41:468 PAYWALL CHECK STATUS: c4d7fa1f35.js:42:331 "PWAPI URL: https://pwapi.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/09/12/state-department-official-quietly-visits-moscow-to-discuss-north-korea/?rplapisplit=1&referrer=https://www.washingtonpost.com/" c4d7fa1f35.js:42:405 PAYWALL ACTION: 0 c4d7fa1f35.js:43:138 PAYWALL URL: N/A c4d7fa1f35.js:43:218 PAYWALL SUB: Unsubscribed c4d7fa1f35.js:43:292 PAYWALL METERED: Metered c4d7fa1f35.js:43:393 PAYWALL METER COUNT: 4 c4d7fa1f35.js:43:498 PAYWALL MODE: 1 c4d7fa1f35.js:44:49 PB Debug: Fired comment_count_target.init:[object Object] c94e09db1d.js:381:443 boomerang.nt: [info] This user agent supports NavigationTiming. wprum.min.js:1:10101 pt.fetchStart: 1505251033854 wprum.min.js:1:10803 boomerang: [debug] Checking if we can send beacon wprum.min.js:1:10101 boomerang: [debug] Sending url: //rumds.wpdigital.net/metrics/?rum=%7B%22redt%22%3A0%2C%22nl%22%3A285%2C%22dns%22%3A0%2C%22tcp%22%3A0%2C%22rest%22%3A195%2C%22domt%22%3A904%2C%22uplt%22%3A3052%2C%22url%22%3A%22https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fnews%2Fjosh-rogin%2Fwp%2F2017%2F09%2F12%2Fstate-department-official-quietly-visits-moscow-to-discuss-north-korea%2F%3Futm_term%3D.b5cb34fc201d%22%2C%22site%22%3A%22www.washingtonpost.com%22%2C%22title%22%3A%22State%20Department%20official%20quietly%20visits%20Moscow%20to%20discuss%20North%20Korea%20-%20The%20Washington%20Post%22%2C%22domn%22%3A940%2C%22section%22%3A%22opinions%22%2C%22cntt%22%3A%22blog%22%7D v=0.9 u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fnews%2Fjosh-rogin%2Fwp%2F2017%2F09%2F12%2Fstate-department-official-quietly-visits-moscow-to-discuss-north-korea%2F%3Futm_term%3D.b5cb34fc201d if= wprum.min.js:1:10101 PB Debug: Fired sticky-vertical-sharebar.collides_with_main_content:false c94e09db1d.js:381:443 PB Debug: Fired nav.start_close:true c94e09db1d.js:381:443 PB Debug: Fired nav.finish_close:true c94e09db1d.js:381:443 Comments load: timer startedtwp-comments.js:1 [Echo.UserSession] error : Unable to initialize user session, error response from IdentityServer API received | args: Object { response: Object } 499c2b4a02.js:294:297

EasyTiger_ 9y ago

The top of HN for an article which says nothing much at all, really?

KajMagnus 9y ago
Interestingly enough, I submitted something similar yesterday, about another open-source commenting system with different features: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15242630 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15242630 — it got zero upvotes, although i think it's a bit interesting to read, for those interested in online comments. And the Mozilla post got > 500. Interesting how HN works, ... and the accumulation principle.

yeukhon 9y ago

Let me distract you from the actual content of the article first (I am sorry), because I am a little frustrated (I usually don't, and always almost give credits to the awesome works done by Mozilla; disclaimer: used to be a Mozilla intern). This article is too shy from actually showcase the product. Half of the article is devoted to PR announcement (which IMO is really a waste of time for most readers, even for the non-technical ones). Just first paragraph into the article, I had already given up reading through, but instead put my effort in spotting keywords to understand the motivations behind this new system, instead of jargons. The second half is a brief overview of the new system, but only two lines are relevant to what I was looking for. It’s filled with features that improve interactions, including functions that show the best comments first, ignore specific users, find great commenters, give badges to staff members, filter out unreliable flaggers, and offer a range of audience reactions. Then the rest of the bullet points are the usual "privacy" and "open source" speech which of course are important nonetheless. So I still don't have my answers (also badges system is really an unnecessary feature for a commentary system, espeically at the scale of a news site like WaPo). I suggest next time the writer should: * tell readers the challenges/flaws in existing system concretely and perhaps showing examples * the finding from their research participants, the hypothesis ,and how they conducted their experiments * explain concretely how the proposed system will help address the prominent flaws and issues This perhaps should turn into a research paper, but even as a blog post it should have more substances. At best, this article feels like a company quarterly performance announcement, which I just scan for keywords and move on, then I forget about all of it. So, what is the point of reading this anyway? README would have been far more interesting. I am disappointed. ---- Anyway, I don't really read comments on news sites. I can't explain why exactly but I feel disconnected and buried (much like what @creagpatr said about fixed commentary). I'd rather go on FB and comment there, even though there is a fairly good chance no one can read mine. Perhaps the social part of FB feels more lively and often comments are funny as hell. Yes, I know that comments on FB are just as echo chamber as many other places do. There is a site allows people to take side and debate to death. I forgot the name though...

redavni 9y ago
They did give examples. The Miami Herald, which uses Facebook comments. PBS Frontline which uses Discus, and Omnivision or something...which I couldn't find any comments. lol > perhaps showing examples

hello_there 9y ago

Here's a slightly off-topic dream about online comments: In an ideal comment system I believe that articles, comments and moderation events should come from three different, decentralized streams (like Atom) that the end user can subscribe to individually and that are joined at the end users client. That would would provide transparency to the moderation process, ability to comment anywhere, and it would allow moderators to become effective spam-filters without giving them the power of censorship. Now, imagine if this system was built into the browser and it became the default commenting platform for all websites...

ZenoArrow 9y ago
I like where you're going with this, but here's a question for you... Who controls the streams that are available on a website? Is it the end user or the website owner?
- unescape 9y ago
  The end user should always be in control.
  - ZenoArrow 9y ago
    You say that, but have you considered the downsides? Imagine you know someone in the public eye, let's say a musician, with their own website. They enable comments, and site now has comments all over it that they have no editorial control over whatsoever. People are posting a high amount of offensive content. What do you advise that this musician does?
    - unescape 9y ago
      The musician can display whatever they want on their website; they don't have to host content they don't like. In the "dream" commenting system, the comments are independent; you can apply your own filters and fetch comments from sources the site owner may not approve of.

gkya 9y ago

I believe it's better to have discussion happen elsewhere, as in HN, Reddit, Usenet, &c., or in blogs and columns. This is cheaper for the publisher, and often those communities generate better discussion as they are comprised of more interested individuals with more genuine participation.

_rpd 9y ago
It isn't better for the publisher though. The longer that they can keep eyeballs at a site that they control, the more advertising they can sell. Commenting also allows the publishers to collect more demographic and psychographic data, which allows the publisher to charge advertisers more per view/clickthrough.
- gkya 9y ago
  I really hope we will devise a better way to monetise online publishing, because ideally as a reader you'd want to keep your eyeballs at a site for the shortest amount of time possible.

unescape 9y ago

Mozilla Talk could be useful if it let me apply my own moderation schema (filters, blocklists, etc). It looks like another totally centralized moderation tool: https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html https://coralproject.net/products/talk.html The only explanation of their approach is that they did "an enormous amount of research". This sounds about as convincing as someone claiming "Oh, I took a class in that."

wyattjoh 9y ago
Believe it or not, you can! Check our the documentation https://coralproject.github.io/talk/ https://coralproject.github.io/talk/ where you can use plugins to hook any any part of the commenting process.
- unescape 9y ago
  Are you saying I can run plugins as a site user (not administrator)? That doesn't seem to be the case. https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/running/plugins/ https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/running/plugins/
  - wyattjoh 9y ago
    As a site admin, not a user. If you see our server side plugin api [1] you can see ways to extend the graph schema, hook into existing mutations/queries completed by the system to apply any set of rules or moderation policies you want. It would be a neat implementation if as a user, you were given the ability to create your own filters, which would certainly be possible if implemented via a plugin! But don't expect to do that on WaPo anytime soon. [1]: https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/plugins/server/ https://coralproject.github.io/talk/docs/plugins/server/
    - unescape 9y ago
      Thanks for the explanation. I would be interested to help build a plugin that implements user-local moderation policies, if sites would actually install it. If that's not likely to happen, then a distributed commenting model seems more useful to me.

peterjlee 9y ago

I think to have good comments, you need to build a good community. I sometimes see the same article shared across HN, Reddit and Facebook. Some sites have better comments than others..

mobilefriendly 9y ago

Mozilla -- the organization that fired its CEO because it disagreed with a political donation he made in California -- lacks credibility when it talks about building an "open society".

intopieces 9y ago
"Brendan Eich was not fired. After his appointment, there was backlash from the Mozilla Community. He came under pressure to resign and he did. The Mozilla Board that appointed him knew about his donation; they did not "remove him because of his views." If that alone was the issue, they simply wouldn't have given him the job in the first place. Resignation (after only 11 days in the CEO role) became the only viable path forward when a sizable portion of the Mozilla Community refused to follow the person that the Board designated to lead the organization. That wide refusal and rejection fomented the issue, and Eich's decision to maintain his public stance on gay marriage -- as is his right -- created an impasse. It is incorrect to say that he was fired or removed; it is fair, though, to say that he was forced out." https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ceo-brendan-eich-deserve-to-be-removed-from-his-position-due-to-his-support-for-proposition-8/#5f72f8602158 https://www.forbes.com/sites/quora/2014/04/11/did-mozilla-ce...
- xienze 9y ago
  > Brendan Eich was not fired. ... He came under pressure to resign and he did. So in other words, he was told if he didn't resign he'd be fired. Let's not play games, he wasn't going to survive that episode. > The Mozilla Board that appointed him knew about his donation I seriously doubt that, unless checking a person's political donations is a standard course of action Mozilla takes -- which would open a major can of worms (you didn't promote me because I donated to Trump). The whole episode reeked of someone digging around and raising a stink shortly after he made a highly visible move -- otherwise, why did no one in the "community" take issue with his donation in the several years prior?
  - FrankBooth 9y ago
    > So in other words, he was told if he didn't resign he'd be fired. External pressure, not internal. > I seriously doubt that, unless checking a person's political donations is a standard course of action Mozilla takes No need to do an investigation, it had been raised by people who were upset by the action years earlier. > otherwise, why did no one in the "community" take issue with his donation in the several years prior? They did, years earlier. You could've found this out yourself, but instead you decided to make trouble here instead. It's best to stick to topics you understand.

mythrwy 9y ago

You don't need to go to the comments sections of Washington Post to find trolling. There is plenty in the articles, particularly the opinion section. Of course they are mostly trolling Donald Trump lately so some people don't mind.

schemathings 9y ago

I think it would be interesting to see a filter that generates something along the lines of Amazon.com's Statistically Improbable Phrases, or "SIPs", the most distinctive phrases in the text of books, but for articles, and then tracks how closely the comments line up for that particular article .. might be a good indicator for authority ?

Nelkins 9y ago

If anyone was looking for it, the source is here: https://github.com/coralproject/talk https://github.com/coralproject/talk

jedberg 9y ago

Reddit has had embeddable comment threads for over two years. It was a feature I actually worked on nine years ago, but the standards weren't there at the time to make it work with voting. I know I'm super biased, but I still find Reddit comments the easiest to read and follow (HN is a pretty close second, especially after they added comment collapsing). Is it really just bad marketing it on Reddit's part that keeps others from using their embeddable comments? As a site owner, you can fully moderate the conversation by only embedding comments from a subreddit you fully control. You may not get quite as much data as Mozilla's solution, but in exchange you get the benefit of Reddit's 12 years of spam data that train its filters. I just don't understand why more sites don't embed the reddit comments.

monk_e_boy 9y ago
The best comment threads are on Slashdot, the ability to filter comments less than +2 makes it much easier to skim read all the good comments. On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting) Categorising (a la slashdot) comments is interesting, you can filter out 'funny' and keep 'informative' etc. But I guess it puts a burden on the users to select the right 'up vote' .... do you have a funny button, an informative button, etc? Facebook has solved this with their 'reaction' icons (like, funny, shock, heart) so user apatite is there for this kind of classification.
- jedberg 9y ago
  > On Reddit, if the top comment is a joke, you need to wade through a million other jokes before you get to the next top level comment (which may be interesting) You can just collapse it. I agree with you that the categorization on Slashdot was nice, as was the metamoderating. But when I find myself on Slashdot these days, I find it impossible to follow a conversation with so many collapsed comments.
  - monk_e_boy 9y ago
    > You can just collapse it. Yeah, but I've usually swiped down and I don't know if its worth going back up to collapse it. Default sorting by category would be nice, push the funnies down and pull the interesting ones up.

elihu 9y ago

How do users authenticate? Do they need to register for an account and give their email address to every website they want to comment on? This seems like it would have been a good use-case for Persona, but that project was cancelled; is there any good replacement these days, besides the ubiquitous "sign in with your facebook account"?

StevePerkins 9y ago

I started by reading the comments section here on HN. Couldn't find any solid information about what this Mozilla thing actually is. So I broke down, and clicked the link to actually read the source article. Still couldn't find any meaningful information about the thing. At this point I considered this a personal challenge. So I clicked the link at the bottom of the article, to ITS original source (http://coralproject.net/ http://coralproject.net/). Still couldn't find any solid non-marketingspeak information about the thing. The Internet in 2017, folks. It's just turtles (comments) all the way down...

dredmorbius 9y ago
TFA actually does break down the deets on the technology reasonably clearly. I find your comment mischaracterises it significantly.
abiox 9y ago
can't tell if this is serious or not.
- KajMagnus 9y ago
  Some people here at HN might be young people who are just getting interested in tech and internet stuff. The one you replied to might be a super bright young person, who just doesn't recognize all company names, just yet. ... Hmm, but when s/he says "this is year 2017" then it seems to me as if s/he has been around for a while, and likely would haven seen "Mozilla" before. :- ) B.t.w., Steve (the grandparent poster): Mozilla makes a super famous browser named Firefox. That's maybe the main reason "everyone" knows who they are.

snakeanus 9y ago

It would be nice if they would drop the account system and just let the users post their comments signed by their private key if they want to associate a comment with themselves or their persona. It would also be nice if they supported NNTP for commenting and reading comments. Moreover I think that it would be great if it worked without any js (or if at least worked with addons like librejs) - knowing mozilla however they will probably not care about these.

hartator 9y ago

Shouldn't they be focusing on the browser? There is literally a good hundred of solid solutions out there for web commenting - hosted, embedded or app libraries -, and Talk doesn't seem innovative at all.

pcr0 9y ago
Could you give some examples? Particularly ones that are open-source and framework-agnostic.
KajMagnus 9y ago
Here's one that innovates a bit, when it comes to browser side features, e.g. making large discussions simpler to navigate: (I'm developing it) https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments (example feature: click the arrows to jump to the parent post and refresh your mind, then click "Back" to jump back down & continue reading. But haven't ported the Back button to iframes yet.) (submitted yesterday, got zero attention :-/ ) Maybe for the staff at the newspaper, moderation features are more cool innovations, because that's what they will be using the most?

tasty_freeze 9y ago

I've always been frustrated by the Washington Post comment system. Many articles have hundreds, perhaps more than a thousand comments. When I revisit an article, I can sort by newest/oldest/highest replies or something like that. I can go to my user profile, select "my comments" and view my recent comments (though not in the context of the article they came from). For the comments I left where someone replied to me, I have no way to reply to them, other than to return to the article and hit "show more comments" 100 times and locate my comment and the reply so I can reply in turn. I hope the new system fixes that. It is otherwise about impossible to hold a conversation, so it reduces the incentive to leave a comment in the first place.

heroprotagonist 9y ago

I love Mozilla's efforts and I think this is an important area to improve. But, as petty and selfish as it sounds, I wish it were built in my development language of choice. Then I could modify and use it myself, or contribute, without that irrational dirty feeling. I know, node is very popular, and no disrespect to you if you use it. It's a personal failing. I just can't put my personal time into it any more. When I see a great project I get excited, and search out the source to see what it's written in. Then I often feel disappointed. Maybe I need to gain some flexibility.

remir 9y ago

Why not use machine learning and a sort of "reputation system" to filter out the noise and trolls? The system could analyse comments, but the users could also, instead of upvote/downvote buttons, have buttons with reactions such as "Interesting", "Insightful", "Not relevant", etc... Some people have informed opinion/interesting things to say and some people just contribute noise to the discussion. The system can learn both from the language and reactions from people. Just like in "real life", if someone is always talking out their ass, you learn to listen to them less and less because they don't have anything meaningful to say. It's just noise. The comment system should do the same. It learns from multiple comments and their reactions to determine a reputation. Obviously, if your comments are always seen as "not-relevant" and "toxic", then your contribution is worth less than other "insightful" and "interesting" contributions, so past a certain threshold, you stop being able to comment.

colejohnson66 9y ago
Isn't that what Facebook does with their curated newsfeed? Doesn't that just make echo chambers?
- remir 9y ago
  I'm not on Facebook so I don't know much about the newsfeed, but the goal is to eliminate trolling and toxicity, not debates.
  - interstitial 9y ago
    The goal is to make companies pay for sponsored post and keep users "engaged" through manipulation. Nothing else.
colordrops 9y ago
Seems dangerous if the rules are not adjusted right. It could end up amplifying certain narratives and extinguishing others, and causing a divide between sets of people as they move to communities where they don't get blocked. Furthermore an AI would be more opaque than a simple voting system, and could easily be manipulated for unethical purposes. Lastly, this sort of system would heavily bias towards the mainstream viewpoint, which is a good heuristic, but the mainstream isn't always right about everything. There is a place for minority voices. I would posit that the extreme political division we now see in the US is a result of more powerful systems for influencing online discourse.

jancsika 9y ago

Can a client make a request to fetch all the things from a specific comment thread? Example: I go to a mailing list for pick-your-favorite-old-grumpy free software project. I click through the ancient, craggy mailman web interface. Hey, there's a button that says, "download the full archive (x MB)." Now I have all the things. Real World Use Case: The Guardian once deleted some comments on a Greenwald op-ed because of insert-old-craggy-British-law-here. Archive access would have empowered users to periodically archive the comments so that they have control over content they want to read, while the publisher is still able to remove comments from flow and archive when forced to censor.

davidy123 9y ago

Comments just aren't a very good approach if the point isn't to just pass time. Annotations are much better. Systems like hypotheth.is are slowly becoming more pervasive.

freeflight 9y ago

Wouldn't the easiest approach to this whole "issue" be to give every user access to individualized blacklisting tools? Just put a "This comment makes me angry" button next to each one and people who feel offended can click it to hide said comment and check a box to hide any future comments from that commenter. There, problem solved with no need for fancy machine learning algorithms or other institutions to play big brother for the internet commenting culture. Voting based systems generally seem to do a pretty decent job most of the time, especially when the community can be segregated by topics/interests like on Reddit.

dmckeon 9y ago
Usenet news user apps had individual blacklisting (and whitelisting and scoring) "killfiles" in the 1980s. They made reading popular newsgroups more tolerable, but did not scale in the face of "endless September" (1993). If a site allows a near-infinite number of anon or sock-puppet accounts, individual or even distributed blacklisting amounts to trying to empty the ocean with teaspoons. If posts or comments were strongly associated with an individual identity, then a distributed scoring system could help produce a more useful set of content, but would be likely to make an echo chamber. But, the scoring system could be gamed by persistent vandals. Also, anonymous or persistent pseudonymous posters may contribute valuable content - how can one allow for that content but defend against abuse?
- freeflight 9y ago
  There's always room for improvement, like making blacklists shareable, AdblockPlus does this with their filter lists, afaik Twitter has, or at least used to have, a feature like that. Even simple measures, like preventing multiple accounts being registered to the same email address, can already greatly cut down on the trolling potential of most garden variety trolls. Nothing about this "problem" is new except for the perceived scale due to Internet-access having become widely available and more people being exposed to Internet culture, but the problem itself is pretty much as old as human interaction in general: How to deal with people whose views seem to be utterly incompatible, even offensive, to mine? Germany has been down this road for quite a bit longer, the only result so far: Comment culture is dying out, in many places it doesn't even grow in the first place anymore because there's isn't even the chance for it, as more and more site operators decide not to implement comment options at all because it puts them in muddy waters, legally speaking. Censorship is never an option, even less so when it's outsourced to some unaccountable entity, even worse when it's some machine learning algorithm where nobody understands how it actually works but people rather like the outputs they got from their inputs, it's basically a censorship blackbox. Honestly, I don't see the need for any of this and it's quite scary how this kind of authoritarianism has become so popular in past years. We used to look at China as a negative example, something we would never want to emulate, this has changed and now increasingly politicians are openly voicing their opinion that a system like China's might actually be "good". Maybe it's just me having gotten a thick skin for this kind of stuff, after 20 years on the net, but I neither see the need for any of this nor the "good" this is supposed to do, all I see is lot's of potential for making the Internet a worse place for open discussion, especially across ideological lines. All I see is yet another move towards more echo-chambers and less diversity of opinions. Which is important regardless how shitty some of those opinions might be, they can always serve as a bad and educational example, censoring them out of sight like they don't even exist, does none of that.

tambourine_man 9y ago

Off topic, but this is the first time I see two slightly different sandwich menus on the same page

intended 9y ago

>New comments and reactions update instantaneously Killer feature - in that its going to kill the process. This is chat. Or close enough to chat that its going to be used as chat. Chat is terrible for comments. A flame war on chat escalates at the rate at which someone can hit enter. like the wake of a ship, the comment area will expand, and defeat moderation ability to clean it up. Flame wars are bad enough, flame wars on chat which persist like comments are a bad idea. Make it update in non-real time.

memeCrasher 9y ago
A conversation that a moderator can't clean up, does save you from biased and unfriendly moderators. Something I find a lot of people carelessly shrug off - moderation isn't always a good thing. The act of moderation is, at its essence, censorship. That's a lot of power to be misused by the wrong sort of people. (and who is the wrong sort...?)

algesten 9y ago

> Talk is small — about 300kb — and lightweight This makes me feel old. Is 300kb really considered small these days?

explodingcamera 9y ago
Not really, 300kb for a pwa seems sane but for just for a comment system? That seems incredible bloated.
- pvdebbe 9y ago
  Not just 300 kB of downloadable code, it's 300 kB of executable code. That's huge
KajMagnus 9y ago
I'm developing an embedded comments system, it's 150 kb on page load. https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments Disqus seems to be 600kb (I summed the size of the "disqus" scripts on a blog that uses Disqus).

deafcalculus 9y ago

I remember a time when commenting seemed like a weird idea. Why would someone write on your site instead of on their own site? And then dynamically generated pages and eventually social networks took over. I wonder if the internet would be a better place if everyone had their own websites and RSS/Atom feeds rather than the centralized services we have today.

camus2 9y ago

Back in the days I thought that what made the Huffington Post popular, politics aside, was its gamified commenting system which I though was excellent. Since then of course, it degraded UX wise until it was replaced by Facebook comments(horrible UX) and something completely useless today. At the end of the day what makes the difference between a good community and a bad one is tight moderation without censorship and focus.

lewisl9029 9y ago

> You own your data. I was super excited when I came across that first sentence in bold (italics here) on one of the points under "Here’s what makes Talk different". Wow, I thought to myself, does this mark yet another step in the revolution of the re-decentralization of the internet? Is Talk a product sharing the same ideological foundations as awesome projects like Sandstorm (https://sandstorm.io/ https://sandstorm.io/), Matrix (https://matrix.org/ https://matrix.org/), remoteStorage (https://remotestorage.io/ https://remotestorage.io/), Solid (https://solid.mit.edu/ https://solid.mit.edu/), and many others that I'm doing a grave injustice to by not mentioning here (please do remind/enlighten me in the comments if you're aware of others!), that strive to give back to users the ability to control their own data to whatever degree technically feasible: where it lives, who has access to which pieces of it, how they may access/manipulate it, under what circumstances, and for how long, etc, etc. The concept of apps built on user-provided and user-controlled data-sources, envisioned by projects like these, has always been immensely appealing to me. If users truly controlled their data, and only granted apps access to the data they need to function, instead of depending on each individual app to host user data in their own locked-off silos, then switching to a different app would be a simple matter of granting another app access to the same pieces of data! Lock-in would completely stop being an issue! Imagine that! We could have a healthy and highly competitive app ecosystem where users choose apps by their own merit instead of by the size of their moat built on nothing but network effects. Newcomers could unseat incumbents by simply providing a better product that users want to use! Like a true free-market meritocracy! And then I read on: > Unlike the most popular systems, every organization using Talk runs its own version of the software, and keeps its own data. Talk doesn’t contain any tracking, or digital surveillance. This is great for journalistic integrity, good for privacy, and important for the internet. And I realized, No, they were not talking to me, a lowly user hoping against hope to one day live in a world where we can truly own and control access to data that rightfully belongs to us. Rather, they were talking to platform owners like Washington Post, loudly proclaiming that with Talk, that they get to own my comments, my profile, my data, and that somehow it is "good for privacy, and important for the internet". Sadly, this is just yet another data point in the unrelenting trend in silo-ization of user data, and stopping that trend is becoming more and more of a distant dream because both newcomers and incumbents today realize the massive competitive advantage lock-in and network effects afford them. Incumbents will never give up their moat and allow the possibility of interop without a fight, and newcomers all end up racing to build up their own walled-off data silos because they have ambitions to become an incumbent enjoying a moat of their own one day. Even products that are built on top of open protocols and allow non-trivial interop tend to eventually go down the path of embrace, extend, extinguish, once they reach any significant scale. Regardless, for this particular instance, my rational mind realizes that platform owners are the group that Mozilla must appease and market to, in order for Talk to stand any chance of success, and that Talk as a product is definitely the lesser of many evils in the same space, and that fundamental change usually manifests itself as a series of small, incremental improvements, much like in this case where an open-source, privacy-respecting product manages to defeat numerous much more deeply pocketed and deeply entrenched rivals to secure a foothold in a competitive market. But as a longtime Mozilla Fanboy, however irrational it may be, I can't help but feel a little bit betrayed when even they are forced to send messages like this in a painful compromise that confirms my lingering suspicion that we're still a long way off from winning the battle for a user-centric internet.

foxhop 9y ago

Comment systems are tricky, everyone has an opinion on how they should work and how they should be moderated. Its very similar to forums and community building. I was so opinionated about my comment system I decided to build my own called Remarkbox (https://www.remarkbox.com https://www.remarkbox.com) Its embed-able like discus but I want it to feel more like hacker news or reddit (deeply nested threads). My system is still a work in progress but I'm actively dog fooding it on my own websites and so far its working well. One major take away I've learned from this thread is that people really like to use the collapse feature here on hacker news and reddit to narrow in on the conversations they care about. I actually never used this feature on either site (I didn't even know what that [-] was on hacker news until today)

binthere 9y ago

> It’s fast. Talk is small — about 300kb Hopefully that's not the client size

KajMagnus 9y ago
Here's one that's 150 kb Javascript on page load, instead of 300 kb: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments — and innovates a bit when it comes to features for the readers. (I'm developing it.) Disqus seems to be 600kb (I summed the size of the "disqus" scripts on a blog that uses Disqus).

manbearpigg 9y ago

It's an echo chamber propaganda tool. It lets the content creator choose which comments are seen.